With the advent of encoded video formats and video enabled personal communication devices, coupled with increasing network bandwidth for efficient video transport, video components for personal communications are becoming commonplace. Wireless phones are able to transmit and display a static image of a caller. Streaming video along with PC-cams enables live video to accompany Internet telephony transmissions. Electronic BBS (bulletin board systems) and chat rooms, once typically a text-only medium, now often provide a video identifier or even a dynamic thumbnail image of the orator. Such video images indicative of the source, or broadcasting user, are also known as avatars. Personal video avatars have now become commonplace for identifying participants in an electronic forum such as wireless calling, video calling, Internet chat rooms, so called “blog spots,” and other vehicles for deriving personal input from a user of a communications device.
The use of video for telephony or other interactive sessions is becoming commonplace, especially involving mobile handsets. In some cases, a participant does not want to be seen as is, but wants to present some video image for other participants to see. Choosing to use an avatar as a representative is one alternative. Avatars can come in at least the following three forms:                a cartoon image, possibly a caricature of the participant, or otherwise portraying characteristics representative of how the participant would like to be perceived,        the image of some other individual, possibly a well known actor or character, and        an image of the participant himself captured at a time when he was more presentable that he currently is.User defined avatars may take photographic or fanciful forms, such as cartoons and caricatures (a representation of a person that is exaggerated for comic effect), or a mix of these, such as a .tif or .gif image electronically modified (i.e.“photoshopped”) to accentuate or add features. Procedures for lip syncing such avatars are also in use. In this process, the actual speech from the participant is analyzed in order to be able to compose mouth movements for the avatar that make it seem like the avatar is actually speaking the participant's words.        
In other applications such as broadcast video or movies, morphing has been used as a special effect to convert from one facial image (initial) to a different facial image (final) using an image that is an interpolation between the other two. Over a period of time, the interpolation smoothly changes from mostly using the initial image to mostly using the final image to give the impression that the face itself is slowly changing from initial form to final form